Betsy DeVos wins confirmation

As predicted, there was a 50-50 tie in the Senate over the confirmation of the rich and totally unqualified Betsy DeVos to be Trump’s education secretary. And also as predicted, Vice-President Pence broke the tie, confirming DeVos. If only a single additional Republican had some integrity! But that, I suppose, is too much to ask. This is the first time in the history of Cabinet nominations that the VP had to break a Senate tie.

Here’s a tw**t provided by Matthew Cobb, showing how much money Devos (who’s a billionaire) gave to all the Republicans who voted for her. After all, they want to keep the dosh flowing. . .

This what Trump was talking about when he said he was going to drain the swamp. More like swamp the drain with money. So now the poor and not so poor who voted for this pathological liar can get their kids an even worse education. Step right up and get your vouchers.

Lisa Murkowski is on that list of those who received money, but according to the Washington Post, she and Susan Collins (of Maine) were the Republicans who voted against DeVos. Wish more Republicans were like that.

Spicer is saying that Democrats are following ‘childish tactics’ with the confirmations. Seriously?

As Molly Ivins used to quote Big Daddy Unruh, “[i]f you can’t take their money, eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, and vote against ’em anyway, you’ve got no business bein’ in” Congress.

The NEA, by the way, is made up of thousands of middle-class educators – the DeVos Foundation is made up of a handful of billionaires. So if you like cooking up numbers, tell us what the $ per donor is?

Maybe this is illustrative too – the DeVoss’ spent more in the 2014 Michigan elections than the UAW.

Yay! Lets hear more equivalency between a handful of billionaires and thousands of working-class people!!!!!

The key here is the continuity of money flowing into the party. This vote is a signal to future donors that, yes, there will be a payoff time if you give generously. See, they’ll say, DeVos was simply a dreadful candidate and yet we got her a juicy plumb of a job shuffling papers. Just think what we could do for a wonderful, talented, person like you! An operative synonym for the way this works is good old crony capitalism. The only way around it is campaign finance reform.

In the hearings Bernie Sanders suggested the family had donated over $200 million iirc. She said that could be correct. She was asked whether that had anything to do with her nomination. She said it hadn’t. The Washington Post called her answer “unconvincing”.

Buying yourself an office has always happened. For hundreds of years, under administrations both conservative and liberal. The qualitative difference here is, money used to buy you an Ambassadorship to Micronesia or something like that. With Trump it buys Secretary of Education.

This is the first time in the history of Cabinet nominations that the VP had to break a Senate tie.

My guess is that was somewhat artificial. There was probably some backroom deal amongst Republicans to the effect of “okay, we know lots of you oppose her, but we only have two “vote your conscience” spots available. So you folks wheel and deal amongst yourselves about who gets those spots and what they’re willing to politically pay to get them, and then we’ll have the official vote with Pence breaking the tie.”

It is a disgrace that someone so unqualified for the job has been entrusted with the future of the country.

There are some good charter schools, but the ones in Michigan (where DeVos has been influencing the system for years) are amongst the worst in the country. They routinely get poorer results than state schools.

And don’t forget Jerry Falwell. He was Trump’s first choice but didn’t want to move to Washington DC. He’s still going to have his hand in though as a top advisor.

Trump has committed and will commit so many disgraces on a daily basis that the public may eventually become numb and resistance to the authoritarian will eventually wither away. This is why authoritarians tend to stay in power for long periods of time. Will it be any different in the United States? I hope so, but I am not particularly sanguine since almost half the voters supported him before he actually took power, when his positions were only verbal. Now he is implementing his promises and his supporters are pleased as punch. Through a combination of those who always supported him, the doubtfulness of sustained resistance, and the moral cowardice of the Republican Party, the authoritarian in the White House is in a good position to maintain power. To put it another way, the survival of the American Republic can no longer be taken for granted.

I agree. I just look at myself. I’ve started writing several posts about things I consider particularly egregious since 20 Jan and most of them never got finished because the topic was taken over by something even worse. I just don’t have the physical capacity to keep up with even the worst in my own areas of interest.

I think we may have the reason Jerry Jr. didn’t want the job. He’s got a much sweeter deal from the federal government in play already. $347 million a year from the public coffers to fund the auto-bilking-machine daddy (may he rest in peace in his matchbox) left him, Liberty U.

Also, his image with his supporters is protected at Liberty U. People will be looking to expose him as a Secretary, and I bet there’s stuff to ferret out – there always is with people who set themselves up as moral authorities.

I hope she at least feels some shame that she barely got through. But a christian billionaire having shame? Yeah, right. And in that same vein, what about Gorsuch? Someone with integrity would say let Merrick Garland have a go at it first. Unfortunately for US citizens, integrity is not to be found in modern republicans. I’m truly baffled at how pathetic most representatives are; it’s beyond stunning.

It is truly pathetic. Just where you need a preponderance of the best people society has to offer is precisely where you end up with a preponderance of the worst people. Judging by history it is simply a result of natural human behavior. We thought we might have had it beat with our little experiment here in the US, but right now it isn’t looking so good.

Sorry, there’s simply no way that you can pin Der Drumpfenfurher’s victory on anybody but him and Hilary.

Hilary won the popular vote, remember?

So, in what perversion of logic do you think that bulking up her popular vote margin by less than 1.5M votes (the number of people who voted nationally for Jill Stein) would have gotten her an Electoral College victory?

You could try instead to direct your ire to the Libertarians. Gary Johnson’s ~4.5M votes was significantly larger than the ~2.6M difference between Señor Smallinpants (~63.0M) and Clinton (~65.9M). But, if you can understand why a Johnson voter wasn’t interested in voting for Clinton, you should have no trouble understanding why a Stein voter was equally unpersuaded.

The big-picture view is that Mr. Tinyhands was the worst candidate the Republicans ever put forth and took office with the worst favorability ratings of any president, ever, period. Any even marginally competent Democratic candidate should have mopped the floor with somebody so horrifically unqualified…

…and, yet, here we are, and it’s not Clinton’s fault?

…how, exactly?

I mean, we had live candid video of the dude bragging of sexual assault, and Clinton, the first major-party woman candidate, wasn’t able to ride that to victory? Never mind the rest of the non-stop showstopping flood of incomprehensible evil that spews forth from that vile creature?

Seriously?

The truth of the matter is, Clinton’s utter incompetence in the campaign demonstrated that, as bad as Drumpf unquestionably and unambiguously and undoubtedly really truly is, she actually wouldn’t be an improvement.

I mean, yeah, her ideology is marginally less repulsive, but she’s demonstrated herself perfectly incapable of the political skill necessary to get anything done, and to prevent bleedin’ obvious political and social upheaval and catastrophe. She had a cakewalk of a test to demonstrate her fitness for office, her ability to navigate modern politics, and she failed it spectacularly.

Basically, we’re screwed, and we’ve been screwed since at least the time the parties picked those two incompetents — which means the damage goes back to however the parties themselves became so wildly dysfunctional as to pick them in the first place.

Which brings us full circle.

The Democrats and Republicans have both overwhelmingly demonstrated themselves inadequate or uninterested in the cause you wish of them…

…and it’s the fault of the “none of the above” crowd for refusing to sponsor one godawful evil over another horrendous one?

Bill’s barging onto AG Loretta Lynch’s plane on the tarmac of PHX is one of the key factors costing Hillary the election.

That caused Lynch essentially to recuse herself from Hillary’s email investigation, which thrust FBI director James Comey to center stage, leading to his high-profile press conference last July and, thence, to his announcement 11 days before the election of the reopening of investigation.

One can make a strong case that Hillary ran an inept campaign. But to say that Hillary is an evil not much better than Trump is a variant of those arguments going back to at least the 1950s that there is no meaningful difference between the parties since they both support capitalism. This was a core ideological belief of the New Left of the 1960s. For them, if you did not agree that socialism was the only acceptable economic system then you were a capitalist toady. I did not accept the argument then and I do not now. A common belief in capitalism hardly makes the parties essentially the same, particularly since the Democrats starting with the Wilson presidency and coming to full force under FDR stood for substantial regulation of business, which was why the Republicans of the 1930s hated Roosevelt so much.

If Hillary had been president, there would have been no threat to Medicare and Social Security. The ACA would not have been in jeopardy. The potential ruin of the environment, if not averted, would at least have been delayed. Right-wing religion would not have had an influence in the White House. A white nationalist would not have been the president’s primary advisors. Our allies across the world would not have been alienated. In other words, the country and the world would have been much safer than it currently is. Moreover, the continuance of the Republic would not have been a topic of conversation.

Every victory empowers Bannon and his puppet
Trump to go from crime to crime. At some point there’s going to be a military provocation and then…boom… full blown war. Those of us who remember the mobilizations of the 60’s know that mass protests can lock up the system and bring down those who feel invincible.

I’m a public school teacher. This is bad news for all of us. I went to the twitter link you posted and one commenter equated the money donated to politicians by unions with the money donated by the DeVos family. I have heard this analogy many times and I don’t understand it. Doesn’t it matter that unions represent hundreds of thousands of members and wealthy government patrons represent only themselves? Am I missing something or are people just partisan asses on this issue?

Since Kitzmiller was a federal district (trial) court decision, it’s controlling only in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

I don’t believe that the US Supreme Court decision holding the teaching of creationism unconstitutional, Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), is in any immediate danger. Unless that case is overruled, the president and/or congress cannot make creationism constitutional.

Republicans don’t care about any kind of protest. They have no reason to. They want the voucher system to rob from public schools so they can point to problems with underfunded public schools in order to dismantle them. In the meantime, Representatives are safe in their gerrymandered districts for two more elections, and voter ID laws will further suppress turnout at the midterm elections further favoring Republican incumbents. We may even see new laws reforming voting districts designed to keep the Republicans in power.

They’re counting on people getting worn out from protesting, people getting distracted, and on people forgetting by the midterm. And they’re probably right.

On the other hand, I just saw an ad touting trump’s winning and how he’s already turned the country around but he needs people to call their Congressmen to encourage them to approve his ‘winning team’. They’re worried enough about it they made ads about.

Erik Prince, founder and (until 2009) chairman of Blackwater, is Betsy DeVos’s brother. There is a book about him: Robert Y. Pelton (2006) “License to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.” Blackwater was the infamous security contractor that provided, during the Bush administration, services of up to (in 2005) $750 million a year to the US Govt. and, according to Pelton, had a profit margin of near 50%. They paid their workers $550 a day while charging Washington (CIA) $1500 a day. According to Wikipedia, Prince is a big donor to the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Calvin College.

I think it would be a misconception to assume that most of these are Trump appointees. The GOP has been hell-bent on getting religion, big oil and war hawks into an administration.
The same with the executive orders. We’re talking about a person (Trump) who is essentially illiterate. He doesn’t draft anything and he doesn’t pick cabinet members. The party does all of that….he just has to scribble his name at the bottom of it.
#reformcongress2018

I’ve rarely seen anything as pitiful as Trump at the signing ceremony attempting to read the text of an order. He reads at the level of a 3rd grader. Clearly struggling to interpret the letter patterns and pronounce them. I’m so embarrassed watching him I almost feel sorry for the old fart. But, then I reflect on the damage he’s doing to the country and I revert to contempt.

Right – that was not my point – but rather an undiagnosed disability of some other kinds might be enough. If he were dyslexic and *received help*, then he’d be fit to serve, but if he has trouble reading …

It’s worth mentioning that the reason this is the first time the VP could cast the tiebreaker is that under the old rules confirmation required 60 votes, so it was impossible to HAVE a tie. Dems changed this to simple majority under Obama so they could get past obstructionists.